Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [197]
The landowner smiled at the mention of the profits of Sviyazhsky’s farming, apparently knowing what sort of gains his neighbour and marshal might have.
‘Maybe it’s not profitable,’ Sviyazhsky replied. ‘That only proves that I’m a bad manager, or that I spend the capital to increase the true rent.’
‘Ah, the true rent!’ Levin exclaimed with horror. ‘Maybe true rent exists in Europe, where the land has been improved by the labour put into it; but with us the land all becomes worse from the labour put into it - that is, from being ploughed - and so there’s no true rent.’
‘What do you mean, no true rent? It’s a law.’
‘Then we’re outside the law. True rent won’t clarify anything for us; on the contrary, it will confuse things. No, tell us, how can the theory of true rent ...’
‘Would you like some curds? Masha, send us some curds here, or raspberries,’ he turned to his wife. ‘This year the raspberries went on remarkably late.’
And in a most pleasant state of mind, Sviyazhsky got up and left, apparently assuming that the conversation had ended, at the very place where Levin thought it was just beginning.
Deprived of his interlocutor, Levin went on talking with the landowner, trying to prove to him that all the difficulty came from our not knowing the properties and habits of our worker; but the landowner, like all people who think originally and solitarily, was slow to understand another man’s thought and especially partial to his own. He insisted that the Russian muzhik was a swine and liked swinishness, and that to move him out of swinishness, authority was needed, and there was none, a stick was needed, and we suddenly became so liberal that we replaced the thousand-year-old stick with some sort of lawyers and lock-ups, in which worthless, stinking muzhiks are fed good soup and allotted so many cubic feet of air.
‘Why do you think,’ said Levin, trying to return to the question, ‘that it’s impossible to find relations with the workforce that would make work productive?’
‘That will never be done with the Russian peasantry without a stick! There’s no authority,’ the landowner replied.
‘How can new forms be found?’ said Sviyazhsky, who, having eaten his curds and lit a cigarette, again came over to the arguers. ‘All possible relations to the workforce have been defined and studied,’ he said. ‘That leftover of barbarism - the primitive community with its mutual guarantees - is falling apart of itself, serfdom is abolished, there remains only free labour, and its forms are defined and ready, and we must accept them. The hired worker, the day-labourer, the farmhand - you won’t get away from that.’
‘But Europe is dissatisfied with these forms.’
‘Dissatisfied and searching for new ones. And she’ll probably find them.’
‘That’s just what I’m talking about,’ replied Levin. ‘Why shouldn’t we search for them on our own?’
‘Because it’s the same as inventing new ways of building railways. They’re invented and ready.’
‘But what if they don’t suit us? What if they’re stupid?’ said Levin.
And again he noticed the look of fear in Sviyazhsky’s eyes.
‘Yes, right: we’ll win at a canter, we’ve found what Europe’s searching for! I know all that, but, pardon me, do you know what’s been done in Europe about the question of workers’ conditions?’
‘No, very little.’
‘This question now occupies the best minds in Europe. The Schulze-Delitsch tendency ... Also all the vast literature on the workers question, on the most liberal Lassalle tendency ... The Mulhouse system is already a fact, you surely know that.’27
‘I have an idea, but a very vague one.’
‘No, you only say so; you surely know it all as well as I do. Of course, I’m no social professor, but it once interested me, and if it interests you, you really should look into it.’
‘But what did they arrive at?’
‘Excuse me ...’
The landowners got up, and Sviyazhsky, again stopping Levin in his unpleasant habit of prying